Forgive a poor columnist. When an astronaut runs for prime minister it’s impossible not to make references to spinning, gravity, weightlessness and the like. Marc Garneau, who is running for Liberal leader, which is a light year or two farther from 24 Sussex than it used to be, was the country’s first astronaut. You’d think this alone would give him ample, er, star power, but in fact real-life astronauts tend to be the understated, unflappable, team-focused sort whose heart rate rates rise, oh, maybe two or three beats a minute when things threaten, literally, to blow up. When the mission is to speed up voters’ heartbeats, these heroes are (I’m sorry) lost in space compared with former prime ministers’ sons.

Making a virtue of necessity, Mr. Garneau aims to be the candidate of gravitas rather than excitement, arguing in effect that in manning its highest office, a country is better served by a safe pair of hands than a pop star. That it’s the same argument offered by Stephen Harper, another purveyor of competence over charisma, doesn’t mean it won’t work. Come the next election, voters may decide they prefer new safe hands to old.

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Unfortunately, gravitas in the Liberal party is a little like gravity on the Moon, i.e., a few newtons short of Earth strength.
Mr. Garneau did gain praise with his plan to open up telecommunications to foreign competition. CRTC directives are never going improve service or bring rates down. What’s needed is an American, European or Asian giant or two jumping in to force efficiencies. If instead we keep the market small and cosy, prices will stay high and service mediocre.

And yet, strangely, a Garneau telecom policy would exempt broadcasting. His version of telecom’s future still envisions a CBC and a continuing alphabet soup of video and broadcast funds. Mr. Garneau was eloquent, if brief, in explaining his new, more open policy on the technology side. Maybe as the leadership campaign proceeds he could explain why openness and competition aren’t virtues on the broadcast side, too. The consumer is his focus at the hardware end of telecom. Anything that honours consumer choice is the Garneau policy. So why isn’t that also the policy on the software side? Why can’t Canadians be trusted to make their own choices in their own ways about what content they want to see, just as wisely and carefully as they choose which carrier will bring them that content? Indeed, how does it make sense to let them choose one but not the other?

Could Mr. Garneau also expand on what he would do if a strategy of openness on the hardware side didn’t in the end leave room for Canadian operators. Would he be content to see the industry run, subject to Canadian regulation of course, by foreigners? If you truly trust market processes, you don’t really care who moves the bytes. How does Mr. Garneau feel? If Canadian consumers did decide no Canadian firm deserved to survive, would Mr. Garneau be happy with that or would he not preserve some portion of the market for the halt and the lame, in former Liberal Finance Minister Donald Macdonald’s phrase for the ages?

As for the rest of Mr. Garneau’s platform, some say it is so pro-market it outflanks the Harper Conservatives on the right. Now, the Conservatives have moved so assiduously to the centre that outflanking them on the right isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be, but just how market-oriented is Mr. Garneau?

As he described them to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto Wednesday, the policy innovations Mr. Garneau proposes are to: get our venture capital system onto a sustainable glide path by removing capital gains tax on startups and providing tax benefits for those other denizens of the heavens, “angel investors;” cut taxes for small and medium-sized (but for some reason not big) businesses that train workers (because the $300 a year difference between what our firms spend on training and what U.S firms do is a major determinant of our 20% productivity deficit with the Americans); integrate new Canadians into the work force; and use tax breaks to subsidize the hiring of young Canadians, “who are our future.”

How exactly are these innovative and right-wing? We already have multiple tax gimmicks for startups and training and have had for a long time. Integrating new Canadians into the work force must be the job of at least two dozen ministries across the country. Outright subsidies for hiring young Canadians have been a summer staple of governments for decades. Making summer last all year long is innovative in a way but hardly “transformative.”

In essence, the policies Mr. Garneau proposes are “if-then” tax cuts: If businesses do something government believes is good for economic growth, then businesses get tax cuts. So long as they spend their money in government-approved ways, they get to keep it. That’s not market-oriented! Market-oriented is when governments keep taxes low and let businesses and consumers meeting in, yes, markets decide how the economy evolves.

Mr. Garneau stresses that, unlike the Tories, his policies will be “science-based.” That gives Liberals a clear choice, for Justin Trudeau says only that his policies will be “fact-based.” But what does “fact-” or “science-” based mean? Another Garneau proposal is for a federal “children’s commissioner,” even though every province and territory already has a children’s commissioner. Without one at the federal level too, it seems, we can’t be sure the interests of all children will be sufficiently represented. (MPs and bureaucrats who are parents evidently use up all their wisdom and concern on their own children.)

Do either facts or science establish that yet another official in this area will make any children better off (not counting, that is, the children of adults who will make excellent salaries working for a federal children’s commission)? Or is this yet another instance of the time-dishonoured tradition of sentiment-based policy? To assuage people’s guilt, distress or sorrow about various scandals, tragedies or social problems, we establish a bureaucracy officially dedicated to them. “We announce, we budget, we spend, therefore we care. We are Liberals.”

Sitting atop a controlled explosion and rocketing into space takes courage columnists can only marvel at. So far, however, Mr. Garneau’s policy recommendations have not required courage. Deregulating telecoms is an easy promise (unless you pine for a seat on the board of Bell or Rogers). Big telecom companies rank with banks and pedophiles in terms of populist loathing.

By contrast, a market-oriented proposal that’s really hard to make is Martha Hall Findlay’s idea of doing away with supply management. That pits her against several thousand dairy and poultry farmers who, thanks to their lobbyists and publicists, have an excellent reputation with Canadians. If and when Mr. Garneau joins her out there in middle space, with asteroids zipping by dangerously, then maybe conservatives will be impressed.

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